In Popular Culture
The song has been used several times in car advertisements. Mercedes-Benz used it in television commercials for their cars as early as 1995. The song appeared in additional advertisements in 2007 and again in an advertisement which aired on February 6, 2011 during a Super Bowl commercial. Another commercial, for the BMW Z3, had the driver listening to a cassette tape of the song, frowning after Mercedes-Benz was mentioned, and throwing the tape out of the car after the Porsche is mentioned.
The pianist Glenn Gould used the song prominently in the third and final radio documentary he made for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977. The documentary, titled The Quiet In The Land, is part of what is often referred to as Gould's Solitude Trilogy.
The song was used in the opening of the German movie Der Baader Meinhof Komplex and the film Bangkok Hilton.
In 2011, on the initiative of the British music and lifestyle magazine BLAG, singer and songwriter Estelle, rapper and producer David Banner and the musician Daley composed the new song "Benz", inspired by Joplin's "Mercedes Benz".
Read more about this topic: Mercedes Benz (song)
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man’s culture can spare nothing, wants all material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)